Sunday, March 20, 2011

PSB: Guest Post by Tessa Gratton

Tessa is the debut author of Blood Magic, which will hit the shelves on May 24th, 2011. If you’ve trolled around her website or blog, you’ll know that Blood & Magic are very important to Tessa, so I asked her to talk to us about this subject! It’s really not as morbid as you would think *winks*

The Importance of Being Bloody

When blood comes up in conversation, I suspect most people think about slasher flicks and gory ninja movies and trips to the emergency room. Possibly vampires. But I think of magic.

Or sometimes just cool. Blood has always figured in pretty overtly in my stories – whether they were shorts I wrote when I was 12 and a girl had dragon wings tear painfully and grossly out of her back, novels I wrote in high school with a narrator who cuts out other people’s eyes and sticks them in her own head, stories about angry gods or blood-drinking red caps, or, obviously, The Blood Journals books. In them, blood is the key to magic.

I’ve always associated blood with two main things: life and sacrifice. Maybe that’s from being raised Catholic, and listening to a priest talk about Christ’s blood granting everlasting life, or maybe it’s from reading all that Anne Rice when I was in 5th grade. But what it comes down to for me is that blood = magic. It may be the most potent symbol we have.

When you’re punched in the nose, you bleed. When you give birth, you bleed. When you’re in a car accident or slash open your wrist, you bleed. It’s life and pain pouring out of you – and sometimes that’s enough of a symbol. Bright red blood splattered on a well tells us about violence, a tiny drop of it is like the tip of an iceburg. It’s constantly renewing, and we can’t survive without it.

But in my novels, Blood Magic and The Blood Keeper, blood is just a little be more. It, like I said, is the key to the magic. It quickens power, because it represents sacrifice. You can’t get something for nothing – and what you give in order to get, in this case, is your own blood. Your pain, your energy.

There have to be consequences in life – especially when we’re talking about something like magic. Free magic would be boring, and incredibly dangerous. But magic that requires not only study and an understanding of nature, but also a painful sacrifice, is magic more likely to be used responsibly. (Or at least, that’s the theory.)

Blood matters because it’s a pretty universal symbol of the connection between our bodies and our hearts. That is where my magic lies, and my imagination, too.

Thanks for having me!

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Thank you so much Tessa for taking the time to write this great post for us! It’s been a pleasure to have you on the blog ^^

For Nick Pardee and Silla Kennicot, the cemetery is the center of everything.

Nick is a city boy angry at being forced to move back to the nowhere town of Yaleylah, Missouri where he grew up. He can’t help remembering his mom and the blood magic she practiced – memories he’s tried for five years to escape. Silla, though, doesn’t want to forget; her parents’ apparent murder-suicide left her numb and needing answers. When a book of magic spells in her dad’s handwriting appears on her doorstep, she sees her chance to unravel the mystery of their deaths.

Together they plunge into the world of dark magic, but when a hundred-year-old blood witch comes hunting for the bones of Silla’s parents and the spell book, Nick and Silla will have to let go of everything they believe about who they are, the nature of life and death, and the deadly secrets that hide in blood.

Tynga is a 30 years old mom from Montreal, working as a lab technician in an hospital specialized in heart disease. In her free time, she enjoys reading all things Paranormal and blogging about them. Make sure to say hi on twitter!